you mean td not tb i assume and you do not need $ in front of them. Thanks you got me on the right track. I felt like slapping myself. Basic HTML there. I was too busy looking at code that I forgot that unlike templates which already have the <tr><td> variables there than I needed to add them.
Here is what the code is
if ( $Globals['mostrecent'] == "yes" && $Globals['recentdefault'] == "no" ) {
$output .= "$tbopen";
$output .= "<tr class="tdheader">";
$output .= "<td>";
display_gallery("latest");
$output .= "</td>";
$output .= "</tr>";
$output .= "$tbclose";
$output .= "<br />";
}